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Host David Roberts speaks with guest, environmental scientist Dr Sarah Kapnick. They discuss the overall status of the globe with regards to climate with a level of steadiness that is hard to find. Dr Kapnick is able to communicate effectively the complexities of the topic without downplaying the severity nor inducing overwhelming panic.

Host David Roberts speaks to Bruce Friedrich about how fake meat, plant based or lab grown, can reduce our land use substantially, reduce emissions substantially, and end or reduce the cruelty of animal agriculture. Notably, Friedrich contends that fake meats could end up on a learning curve to bring down the price of these meat alternatives to be cheaper than the real stuff. Much in the same way that we got better at making solar panels and flat screen TVs to the point where those items are magnitudes cheaper than they were just 10 years ago.

A Nobel laureate’s environmentally friendly invention that provides clean water if central supplies are knocked out by a hurricane or drought, could be a life saver for vulnerable islands, its founder says.

The invention, by the chemist Prof Omar Yaghi, uses a type of science called reticular chemistry to create molecularly engineered materials, which can extract moisture from the air and harvest water even in arid and desert conditions.

Atoco, a technology company that Yaghi founded, said their units, comparable in size to a 20-foot shipping container and powered entirely by ultra-low-grade thermal energy, could be placed in local communities to generate up to 1,000 litres of clean water every day, even if centralised electricity and water sources are interrupted by drought or storm damage.

Yaghi, who won the 2025 Nobel prize award in chemistry, said the invention would change the world and benefit islands in the Caribbean, which are prone to drought. He added that it could be a solution for countries needing to get water to marooned communities after hurricanes such as Beryl and Melissa, which left thousands without water.

Plug-in hybrid electric cars (PHEVs) use much more fuel on the road than officially stated by their manufacturers, a large-scale analysis of about a million vehicles of this type has shown.

The Fraunhofer Institute carried out what is thought to be the most comprehensive study of its kind to date, using the data transmitted wirelessly by PHEVs from a variety of manufacturers while they were on the road.

The cars involved were all produced between 2021 and 2023. The data transmitted enabled analysts to determine their precise and real-world fuel consumption, as opposed to that stated in the vehicles’ official EU approved certification.

PHEVs, cars which combine a petrol or diesel engine with a battery-powered electric motor that is charged from an external energy point, give drivers the flexibility to be able to switch between the ecologically safer power source, and the more conventional, but environmentally more damaging one, as and when conditions allow. Manufacturers typically market the vehicles as energy efficient. On paper at least, the vehicles are said to use much less fuel, between one and two litres per 100km, than conventional cars. However environmental groups have long since voiced scepticism over the claims.

According to the study, the vehicles require on average six litres per 100km, or about 300%, more fuel to run than previously cited.

Like many of us who are mindful of our plastic consumption, Beth Gardiner would take her own bags to the supermarket and be annoyed whenever she forgot to do so. Out without her refillable bottle, she would avoid buying bottled water. “Here I am, in my own little life, worrying about that and trying to use less plastic,” she says. Then she read an article in this newspaper, just over eight years ago, and discovered that fossil fuel companies had ploughed more than $180bn (£130bn) into plastic plants in the US since 2010. “It was a kick in the teeth,” says Gardiner. “You’re telling me that while I am beating myself up because I forgot to bring my water bottle, all these huge oil companies are pouring billions …” She looks appalled. “It was just such a shock.”

Two months before that piece was published, a photograph of a seahorse clinging to a plastic cotton bud had gone viral; two years before that England followed Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland and introduced a charge for carrier bags. “I was one of so many people who were trying to use less plastic – and it just felt like such a moment of revelation: these companies are, on the contrary, increasing production and wanting to push [plastic use] up and up.” Then, says Gardiner, as she started researching her book Plastic Inc: Big Oil, Big Money and the Plan to Trash our Future, “it only becomes more shocking.”

Her research took her to Reserve, Louisiana, in the Lower Mississippi River, where she met Robert Taylor, an activist in his 80s who has spent much of his life living by an enormous plastics plant. “He is surrounded by illness, by all kinds of cancers. He only found out in 2016, as a result of federal action, that the levels of toxic gases had gone through the roof in his area, an overwhelmingly Black neighbourhood. He told me about all the illness in his family – affecting his wife and his daughter, his neighbours and his cousins. It was haunting. When we talk about plastic, we tend to think about the ways we experience it in our own lives, and we’re not as aware of the production and the impact it has on the people who live beside it.”

Every year more than 12 million people visit the White River National Forest in central Colorado to ski, hike, bike, fish, camp and otherwise enjoy this iconic 2.3-million-acre landscape. As part of the public lands system, the forest is collectively owned by the American people and managed by the federal government on our behalf. Recently Senate Republicans tried to make half of it eligible for sale.

The move came last June, when Senator Mike Lee of Utah proposed adding a provision into President Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” to auction off millions of acres of public lands across the Western states. Nominally intended to provide housing and fiscal debt relief to Americans, it was the largest proposed sell-off of federal lands to date. Ultimately the provision was stripped prior to the bill’s passage into law. But this won’t be the last attempt to dismantle public lands and hand them over to private companies. In September 2025 the Center for American Progress published an analysis showing that the Trump administration had already begun taking actions that could collectively eliminate or weaken protections from more than 175 million acres of U.S. lands. With such mass-scale privatization measures ramping up, it’s worth examining what these places actually provide to people versus corporations.

Conflicts over public lands in the U.S. have deep roots. In the 1970s ranchers, extractive-industry groups, county officials and allied Western politicians, later endorsed by President Ronald Reagan, staged the so-called Sagebrush Rebellion to wrest control of hundreds of millions of acres from the federal government. In 2016 the GOP platform openly called for transferring federal lands to states and facilitating the extraction of timber, minerals, coal, oil, and other natural resources from these lands.

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 blueprint goes further in the effort to control public lands and exploit their natural resources. It lays out a plan to roll back the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework’s so-called 30 × 30 initiative to protect and manage 30 percent of the world’s land, fresh waters and oceans by 2030 (Trump has already rescinded the U.S.’s 30 X 30 commitments by executive order). It calls for gutting the Land and Water Conservation Fund, a federal program that has funded the acquisition of land and interest in land to safeguard natural areas, water resources and cultural heritage and to provide recreation opportunities since 1965. Project 2025 also aims to weaken the Antiquities Act of 1906, which allows presidents to protect federal lands of scientific, historic or cultural significance by designating them as national monuments. To that end, the Department of Justice recently ruled the president has the authority to revoke national monuments, and the Department of the Interior has begun broad reviews of monuments with an eye toward development of extractive industry.

We’re still in a La Niña phase in the Pacific right now—the cooler part of the cycle that meant that 2025’s global temperature was “only” the second or third highest ever, trailing 2023, the last big El Niño year. But that hot phase seems to be returning, and somewhat faster than expected. In the last few weeks, big Kelvin waves have been moving eastward across the Pacific, driving warmer water before them; these can sometimes peter out, but strong westerly wind bursts across the region—counter to the usually dominant trade winds—seem to indicate this one is for real; the best guess of the various forecasters is that sometime between June and September the world will enter an El Niño cycle.

When that happens, prepare for bedlam. Each El Niño event in recent decades has gotten steadily worse, because each one drives the temperature to a new record. That’s because each is super-imposed on a higher baseline temperature that comes with the steady warming of the planet. As James Hansen and his team pointed out in a paper last week, the expected low temperature at the close of the La Niña this spring is expected to be about 1.4 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures, which is higher than the maximum from the last El Niños. We are ever further into the great overheating.

We get fires and floods all the time now, but we get lots more of them when the temperature tilts sharply up. As Eric Niiler reported in the Times, the Pacific warm current “brings the potential for extreme rainfall, powerful storms and drought across some areas of the globe.”

The future of the American west hangs in balance this week, as seven states remained at a stalemate over who should bear the brunt of the enormous water cuts needed to pull the imperiled Colorado River back from the brink. Time is running short to reach a deal before a critical deadline, set for Saturday.

In the region where water has long been the source of survival and conflict, the challenges hindering consensus are as steep as the stakes are high.

Snaking across 1,450 miles (2,300km) from the Rocky Mountains into Mexico, the Colorado supplies roughly 40 million people in seven states, 5.5m acres (2.23m hectares) of farmland and dozens of tribes. The waters fuel an estimated $1.4tn in economic activity, and raised bustling cities, including Los Angeles, Phoenix and Las Vegas. The sprawling basin is also home to diverse ecosystems, with scores of birds, fish, plants and animals, and provides critical habitat for more than 150 threatened or endangered species.

The river has also been overdrawn for more than a century. As demand continues to grow, rising temperatures and lower precipitation caused by the climate crisis are taking an increasingly larger share of declining supplies, a trend only expected to worsen as the world warms.

This is admittedly from November, but it's the first deep-dive I've seen.

The story of the United States corn ethanol industry is a story about a sector that grew rapidly under a very specific set of policy, technology and market conditions. It filled a gap when gasoline demand was rising, when climate policy focused on incremental change, and when EVs were still a niche. It became a major part of the Midwestern political economy. It shaped land use patterns. It supported thousands of farmers and dozens of rural communities built around steady demand for transport fuel. That world is shifting and the signals point toward a twenty year horizon that looks very different from the previous twenty, with very significant implications for the Midwest’s economies and likely politics.

Corn ethanol grew from a small program focused on oxygenates into a national industry producing over 16 billion gallons annually, about 48 million metric tons. The Renewable Fuel Standard created guaranteed demand by requiring refiners to blend increasing amounts of ethanol into gasoline. Direct subsidies through the Volumetric Ethanol Excise Tax Credit helped expand capacity. By the late 2000s the industry had become large enough to hold political weight in Iowa, Illinois, Minnesota and Nebraska. Ethanol plants became anchor employers. Farmers gained a new buyer that consumed nearly 40% of the national corn crop. The system became predictable and self reinforcing. All gasoline sold in the country now has about 10% ethanol added, with some higher blends available in some places. Once direct subsidies expired, the mandate and a large fleet of internal combustion vehicles kept the industry stable. That stability is now being tested by structural changes in transportation and energy.

The first challenge appears in the gasoline market itself. EIA data from 2015 through 2019 shows finished motor gasoline stabilizing at roughly 140 billion gallons a year. The post pandemic rebound never reached that range again. By 2024 gasoline demand had slipped below pre pandemic levels even though the population was larger than in 2019. The shift is not a statistical quirk. Efficiency gains, hybrid penetration and improved powertrain design are pushing gasoline demand down. Even modest EV adoption affects fuel consumption more than most people expect because each EV replaces an entire household’s gasoline demand, not a small slice of it. Hybrid and work from home models that are common after COVID also inhibit demand. Gasoline peaks are rarely jagged events. They plateau and then begin slow but durable declines. Ethanol demand sits inside that shrinking pool. Rising blend rates cannot compensate if the base declines year after year.

Weather agencies and climate scientists have pointed to the possibility of an El Niño forming in the Pacific Ocean later this year – a phenomenon that could push global temperatures to all-time record highs in 2027.

Both the US government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology have said some climate models are forecasting an El Niño but both cautioned those results came with uncertainties.

Experts told the Guardian it was too early to be confident, but there were signals in the spread of sea surface temperatures in the Pacific that suggested an El Niño could form in 2026.

The cycle of ocean temperatures in the Pacific – known as the El Niño southern oscillation (ENSO) – is linked with extreme climate events around the world.

When warmer-than-average waters gather in the east of the equatorial Pacific and extend to the coast of the American continent, this is known as an El Niño and tends to give global temperatures a boost and, in Australia, can be linked to drier and hotter conditions.

Enforcement against polluters in the United States plunged in the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term, a far bigger drop than in the same period of his first term, according to a new report from a watchdog group.

By analyzing a range of federal court and administrative data, the nonprofit Environmental Integrity Project found that civil lawsuits filed by the U.S. Department of Justice in cases referred by the Environmental Protection Agency dropped to just 16 in the first 12 months after Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20, 2025. That is 76 percent less than in the first year of the Biden administration.

Trump’s first administration filed 86 such cases in its first year, which was in turn a drop from the Obama administration’s 127 four years earlier.

“Our nation’s landmark environmental laws are meaningless when EPA does not enforce the rules,” Jen Duggan, executive director of the Environmental Integrity Project, said in a statement.

The findings echo two recent analyses from the nonprofits Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility and Earthjustice, which both documented dwindling environmental enforcement under Trump.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/33800925

“What is happening on the Tapajós is not an isolated episode: it is the direct consequence of decisions that treat rivers as export corridors and push projects forward without real listening and without rights safeguards. During COP30, more than 500 Indigenous people warned the world about the risks of projects tied to the Ferrogrão export corridor and the dredging of the Tapajós – and still, their demands remain without an effective response. The international community, buyers, and financiers cannot keep normalizing a ‘progress’ that fuels conflict and threatens living territories,” said Vivi Borari, an Indigenous leader and activist in the Tapajós Vivo Movement, a member organization of the Enough Soy Alliance.

“While Cargill tells the press that they have no control over the reckless expansion of export-oriented infrastructure across the Amazon, the opposite is true,” said Christian Poirier, Amazon Watch Program Director. “It is the demands of powerful commodity traders like Cargill that drive the destructive privatization of Amazonian rivers and construction of mega-projects like Ferrogrão. The Indigenous mobilization chose Cargill’s grain terminal for this reason, to hold them accountable alongside sectors of the Brazilian government.”

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/33800866

“We have been occupying the U.S. company Cargill for 14 days, and now we have blocked access to Santarém’s airport, where many people come to take photos and swim in the river without knowing about the problems we are facing. The president signed a decree that privatizes three rivers – the Tapajós, Tocantins, and Madeira – and advanced a measure that opens the way for dredging the Tapajós. Our river is at risk. The government can no longer tell Europe and the United States that it preserves the environment while destroying it here,” said Goldman Prize winner Alessandra Korap Munduruku, a leader from the Middle Tapajós region.

During Wednesday’s meeting with government representatives, Chief Gilson Tupinambá announced the blockade of access to the airport in response to the lack of effective government steps to address the movement’s demands. “I want to tell all of you that no one is leaving Santarém, the airport has just been closed. No one is leaving Santarém. And you are going to stay here with us, eat what we eat, go through what we go through, until we get an answer,” he said.

“We went to COP30 and it was a staged circus. There, they promised Free, Prior, and Informed Consultation, but now we don’t want consultation, we want this decree revoked. Revoke it now. I’m 50 years old and my concern is for our children and grandchildren. What will be left because of greed?” said Chief Gilson Tupinambá.

Who would have guessed?

Flawed economic models mean the accelerating impact of the climate crisis could lead to a global financial crash, experts warn.

Recovery would be far harder than after the 2008 financial crash, they said, as “we can’t bail out the Earth like we did the banks”.

As the world speeds towards 2C of global heating, the risks of extreme weather disasters and climate tipping points are increasing fast. But current economic models used by governments and financial institutions entirely miss such shocks, the researchers said, instead forecasting that steady economic growth will be slowed only by gradually rising average temperatures. This is because the models assume the future will behave like the past, despite the burning of fossil fuels pushing the climate system into uncharted territory.

Tipping points, such as the collapse of critical Atlantic currents or the Greenland ice sheet, would have global consequences for society. Some are thought to be at, or very close to, their tipping points but the timing is difficult to predict. Combined extreme weather disasters could wipe out national economies, the researchers, from the University of Exeter and financial thinktank Carbon Tracker Initiative, said.

In the dim flicker of a kerosene lantern on a fog-wreathed houseboat, I watched Nazia Qasim’s reed-scarred hands pierce threadbare fabric with her needle, weaving colored abayas as her eyes fixed on Dal Lake’s silt-choked horizon, diesel haze mingling with the sour tang of rotting lotus stems, where vibrant beds once bloomed.

I’ve heard endless tales from Nazia—and Qudisa, and Bano, and their sisters—about how the lake’s relentless shrinkage has mirrored their own lives’ contracting. Yet the women have overcome: As the lake withers, under absent snows and dying streams, the water now polluted and undrinkable, they have found new work and purpose through their weaving. For hours last January, I watched their hands move in the lantern’s glow, transforming loss into livelihood. This sisterhood, which once thrived on an endless, ancestral bounty of lotus, water chestnuts, and fish, now scraps stitched tight, the women’s quiet knots a fierce stand against the fade.

As a climate reporter based largely out of India, I am often tasked with telling stories on the frontlines of disaster. I have crouched in Pampore’s parched Karewas at dawn, watching farmers Farida Jan and Snobar Ahad recount the decline of saffron, a visceral dirge for disappearing traditions I could feel in the cracked earth underfoot. I’ve seen women shoulder jerry cans under a merciless sun, irrigating wilted bulbs past cobwebbed government drip lines, turning the world’s most prized spices into frantic wagers against the sky, where one failed season means debt for entire villages. And in countless moments, I’ve watched with growing frustration how easily the world abandons the Global South, which disproportionately bears the brunt of climate change, and how rarely the countries most responsible seem to face the same consequences.

This work necessitates exhaustive fieldwork in fragile ecosystems, sifting through scarce data amid conflict, and confronting the grief of vanishing landscapes and livelihoods. But in my writing on the realities of climate change, I’ve also made a conscious effort to find stories of resilience, rather than just stories of despair. Stories that not only show there are still people who haven’t given up on the fight, but who have made a meaningful difference in changing the tides.

These changemakers are often women.

For someone aiming to end the global livestock industry, Bruce Friedrich begins his new book – called Meat – in disarming fashion: “I’m not here to tell anyone what to eat. You won’t find vegetarian or vegan recipes in this book, and you won’t find a single sentence attempting to convince you to eat differently. This book isn’t about policing your plate.”

There’s more. Friedrich, a vegan for almost four decades, says meat is “humanity’s favourite food”.

“It appears to be biological,” he says. “Meat has dense calories, which come from a lot of fat, and it has an umami flavour that humans have evolved to crave. Plus, meat is deeply rooted in most cultures and is the centrepiece at many social gatherings.”

The global damage wreaked by industrial livestock, from climate-heating methane burps to water pollution to the destruction of forests, is well established. For at least 50 years, says Friedrich, environmentalists, health experts and animal advocates – including him – have been trying to convince people to eat less meat and some have done so.

New investigation reveals vast global overlap between drilling permits and cherished sites crucial for nature

In brief

• Governments have allowed oil and gas companies to operate in more than 7,000 “protected” areas around the world

• Protected sites are recognised by international agreements but left at risk by weak enforcement

• Total global area encroached on is bigger than the size of France and includes sites that are vital buffers against climate change

In 2022, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) committed to developing strategies to reduce emissions from aviation. That process is now well underway.

In March of last year, I attended and reported on a CARB forum focused on technology solutions that could curb climate pollution from the aviation sector. Since that meeting, staff have prepared draft concepts for potential programs and policies that could be brought to the agency’s board for action next year.

Earlier this month, the agency hosted a public workshop to share more details about the four concepts under consideration, which focus on airport operations on the ground and at the gate: controlling emissions from aircraft auxiliary power units; reducing emissions from airport ground support equipment; reducing emissions from aircraft taxiing at the airport; and reducing emissions from aircraft takeoffs and landings.

Nearly half a century ago, the US Department of Energy launched a clean energy experiment beneath the University of Minnesota with a simple goal: storing hot water for months at a time in an aquifer more than 100 metres below ground.

The idea of the seasonal thermal energy storage was to tuck away excess heat produced in summer, then use it in the winter to warm buildings.

Now, 45 years after the first test wells were drilled under the university’s St Paul campus, one of the first large-scale aquifer thermal energy systems in the country is being built less than 10 miles from the original test site.

The Heights, a mixed-use development rising from a former golf course on the city’s Greater East Side, will tap thermal energy from an aquifer 100 to 150 metres below ground.

Groundwater from wells spread across the northern half of the 45-hectare development will be drawn by high-efficiency electric heat pumps, powered in part by solar panels, to provide low-cost heating and cooling with little greenhouse gas emissions for 850 homes and several light-industrial buildings.

Europe’s supermarket shelves are packed with brands billing their plastic packaging as sustainable, but often only a fraction of the materials are truly recovered from waste, with the rest made from petroleum.

Brands using plastic packaging – from Kraft’s Heinz Beanz to Mondelēz’s Philadelphia – use materials made by the plastic manufacturing arm of the oil company Saudi Aramco.

The Saudi state-owned holding opposes production cuts under the UN plastic treaty and is the world’s largest corporate greenhouse gas emitter (more than 70m tonnes up to 2023).

Aramco’s petrochemical subsidiary, Sabic, along with other big players, devised a successful way to rebrand their harmful business as “planet saver”. They label plastic as “circular” and climate-friendly, although in practice it remains almost entirely fossil-based, exacerbating global warming and the plastic crisis.

Under industry pressure, Europe is on track to legalise this practice, which independent experts have described as greenwashing, with lax EU rules set to take effect in 2026 and similar UK regulations to be enforced as of 2027.

Half the world’s 100 largest cities are experiencing high levels of water stress, with 39 of these sitting in regions of “extremely high water stress”, new analysis and mapping has shown.

Water stress means that water withdrawals for public water supply and industry are close to exceeding available supplies, often caused by poor management of water resources exacerbated by climate breakdown.

Watershed Investigations and the Guardian mapped cities on to stressed catchments revealing that Beijing, New York, Los Angeles, Rio de Janeiro and Delhi are among those facing extreme stress, while London, Bangkok and Jakarta are classed as being highly stressed.

Separate analysis of Nasa satellite data, compiled by scientists at University College London, shows which of the largest 100 cities have been drying or getting wetter over two decades with places such as Chennai, Tehran and Zhengzhou showing strong drying trends and Tokyo, Lagos and Kampala showing strong wetting trends. All 100 cities and their trends can be viewed on a new interactive water security atlas.